Where's the evidence that theorbo double reentrant tuning was the principal and 'persisting' attraction of the instrument and not its 'power' due to large size? This unsupported statement looks more like a speculative case for supporting small theorbos in unhistorical tunings (passim previous communications) than anything else. Large theorbos continued to be played and new ones made into the 18th century; representations of professional players generally show large instruments. The archlute in the old, non-reentrant tuning, increasingly popular from the later 17th century. MH howard posner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Campanellas are not necessarily skips of 7ths and 9ths. That's not >> how they're defined. > > I didn't say that they are. What I said was > > "skips of a 7th and 9th in scale passages (known as campanellas) > are commonplace in baroque guitar music. > > It is the scale passages that are known as campanellas not the > skips of a 7th etc.
Scale passages are not known as campanellas. I can sing scale passages. I can't sing campanellas. >> If I want to form an idea of how a >> composer meant passages in 17th-century guitar or theorbo music to >> sound, do I form those ideas from other 17th-century guitar or >> theorbo music, or do I spend a lot of time with the vocal music that >> the composer would have spent his time listening to, accompanying, >> composing and (probably) singing? > > I would suggest that you start off first and foremost by asking > what would work in practice with the kind of strings which might > have been available in the 17th century. > > This is surely the reason why the 1st and 2nd courses on the > theorbo were tuned down an octave - at least that is what I have > always understood. Tuning them to the upper octave was incompatible > with the string length. Don't believe everything you read on the lute net. If reentrant tuning were purely a matter of necessity --an inconvenience endured for the sake of increased size (and thus volume) the theorbo wouldn't have been popular for more than a century. Reentrant tuning might have started as a concession to necessity, but it persisted because of its musical advantages, which > You seem to be suggesting that instrumental music was still > essentially the same as vocal music in the 17th century but surely > the whole point is that instruments have their own idioms which > reflect what they are capable of. They don't simple imitate vocal > music - even when they are accompanying it. I hope I'm not suggesting anything other than what I said -- that the sound picture a 17th-century theorbist or guitarist had in his head was a 17th-century sound picture first and a theorbo or guitar sound picture second, and would have been dominated by the vocal models of the day. Doesn't it strike you as odd that the only instruments in which we have to discuss whether octaves should be displaced in melodic passages are the instruments about which we're unsure of the stringing? Is it more reasonable to assume that they're an island in the musical landscape, or that we haven't figured out the stringing questions? -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html --------------------------------- Sent from Yahoo! - a smarter inbox. --
